#26: Yurt Life

November 10, 2013
·
Palenville, NY

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How many lives have you lived? Let me count a few of mine:
Video games in suburban basements and breakfast at Denny’s at
three in the morning. Saturday tailgating and all-nighters in
undergrad libraries. Sardine commutes and noisy bars and
standing in line for ramen; museums on weekends and brunch and
rooftops and waiting in your office clothes for the train at
the end of a too-long day. More recently, the inverted
metropolis: Writing from home, going on walks when everyone’s
at work, operating on the schedule of au pairs and
stay-at-home parents and NYU students and broke artists and
those for whom money is of no concern. This year I’ve had
tastes of Main Streets that shut down half the week and
Winesburg, Ohioan towns where I’ve stayed long enough to hear
their stories but not long enough to learn their secrets.
There are so many more modes of living and I want to live them
all. Why? I’m not sure, exactly. Reconnaissance, I suppose,
but for what? I have a hunch but I need a few secrets, too.

M. rents a 24-foot yurt in the Catskills. He and his
girlfriend are thinking about leaving Brooklyn and they’ve
been driving up on weekends and using it as an outpost to
explore the Hudson Valley. I ask if I could yurt-sit for a few
days during the week and M. says yes and sends me a PDF
entitled “New Yurt City” with driving directions and things to
do. “Yurt the best,” I email back and the puns end there.

M’s yurt sits with several others at the end of a gravel road
in the woods on property owned by Ward, an artist who invented
those pinscreen toys that were popular in the eighties and
nineties and sold at science museum gift shops and stores like
The Sharper Image. You have probably pressed your face into
one.

Yurts are Mongolian in origin, traditionally round portable
collapsible lattice-frame dwellings covered in fabric and
insulated with felt the nomadic peoples made from sheep’s
wool. The VW Buses for a different topography. The structures
hold up to the weather of Himalayan steppes, Ward would tell
me later, as there aren’t the usual flat surfaces for high
winds to latch onto. M.’s yurt is a more permanent adaptation,
in between a traditional yurt and a Bucky Fuller aluminum
house. It’s closer to a cabin, actually; has electricity and
varnished wood floors and is entered via a smaller rectangular
shed that holds a kitchen and shower with running water, and a
composting toilet.

I get in Monday night and successfully start a fire in the
wood burning stove, an act I have trouble replicating the next
day. I text M. stupid questions like, “Is there a place I go
to get more kindling, or do I make it with this ax??” M.
replies in good humor, tells me there’s a chopping block
outside by the door. “Just remember chopping wood warms you
twice,” M. says, “once when you chop it and again when you
burn it.”

I spend three days in the yurt. I wake at dawn every morning
because the light floods in through the oculus, the clear
plastic domed circular opening in the center of the roof. I
meditate under the light, go out for hikes and food, listen to
records, take a nap in a hammock. After three days in a yurt,
rectangular dwellings seem mildly oppressive. Corners seem
silly. “If you look at the way we move through our spaces,
it’s usually circular,” Ward says when he invites me over for
a beer the second night. We talk about yurts, living in New
York, visits to China, and he asks for advice about a
Kickstarter project he’s thinking about launching. He’s
soft-spoken, intelligent, cunning eyebrows, as pure an artist
as I have ever met. He’s been living on the property for
decades, and the furnishings in his own yurt are warm and
modern and timeless in an Eames workshop kind of way. We
finish our beers and he asks, “Have you seen the view?”

“What view?”

Ward takes me outside to the edge of the land and there’s a
clearing. I can see for dozens of miles. The property, he
tells me, sits on a ridge, and he points to the strings of
twinkling lights in the distance. “That’s Massachussets. Over
there’s Connecticut.”

I come back to Brooklyn and have a Tom Hanks at the end of
Castaway moment. I realize: I am so wasteful. I leave the
faucet on when I brush my teeth and keep the thermostat set
too high. In the yurt everything demands conservation: The
leftover water in the kettle after making tea I use to rinse
out dishes. Each scrap of paper is kindling for the stove.
It’s only when you leave your natural habitat that you realize
how much it shapes you, and you can watch documentaries and
read fiction and go on the internet but the physicality of a
new mode of life always carves deeper. One of the most
personally meaningful things I’ve heard recently is: “Act your
way to new thinking, don’t think your way to new action.”

Give me a big city and an afternoon without plans. Give me a
rental car and a broken phone and a pair of hiking boots. Give
me a house with no corners on a fresh green breast of the
world. Give me the thing I don’t know I want, the place I
don’t know is there, and the patience, the openness, the
negative capability to both accept, and welcome, the lives
I’ve not yet lived.

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